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A Looming Disaster and What To Do about It

by Christopher A. Ferrara
April 4, 2016

This Friday, April 8, 2016, will mark a turning point in the history of the Church and thus the world. A “Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation” running an incredible 200 pages in length will be released at a Vatican press conference, and there is little doubt that the resulting shockwave will shake the Church to its very foundations. The signs are all ominous, beginning with the rather effete title: Amoris Laetitia (“The Joy of Love”), which smacks more of Oprah Winfrey than the solemn Magisterium.

Then there is the emailed notification by Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, President of the Pontifical Council for the Family, which after the Phony Synod should be renamed the Pontifical Council for Undermining the Family. Paglia is the same prelate who openly advocates the admission of public adulterers in “second marriages” to Holy Communion. His email instructs every bishop in the world to hold a press conference simultaneously with the one in the Vatican to “prepare the faithful” for what is in the document. An obvious stratagem for swiftly imposing everywhere, and stifling any opposition to, whatever “revolutionary reforms” the document contains.

Then there are the presenters of the “Joy of Love”: First, the thuggish Cardinal (“the book thief”) Baldisseri, whose heavy-handed manipulation of Synod 2014 in favor of the Kasperite faction, meaning the Francis faction, prompted a floor revolt ignited by Cardinal Pell. Second, Cardinal Christoph Schonborn, another open advocate of Holy Communion for adulterers who was also behind the move to recognize “positive elements” in “homosexual unions.” Also on deck will be a pair of lay academics who addressed the Phony Synod: the husband and wife team of Francesco Miano (a moral philosopher whose doctorates, I am reliably informed, were in situation ethics and existentialism), and Giuseppina De Simone (a thoroughly modern theologian). Here is a photo of the happy couple, taken outside the Phony Synod hall, which does not exactly inspire confidence in their firm adherence to Catholic orthodoxy and orthopraxis:

In short, not a single defender of the Church’s traditional teaching and intrinsically related discipline on the indissolubility of marriage — affirmed by both John Paul II and Benedict XVI — will be involved in the presentation of “The Joy of Love.” Conspicuously absent will be Gerhard Müller, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which reportedly presented some 40 pages of suggested revisions of a draft of the document, clearly indicating that it must be a disaster of epic proportions. Müller’s presence might spoil all the joy that is about to cascade over the Church in a flood of “mercy” so cruelly denied to the divorced and “remarried” by Francis’ hard-hearted predecessors over the past 2,000 years.

Finally, Francis himself tipped his hand during the in-flight press interview on the return from Mexico, when he said that “being integrated into the church does not mean ‘taking Communion’,” by which he meant not immediately but rather after following “the path to integration” as part of “a journey, it is a path.” That was all but a dead giveaway that the “Joy of Love” will include a way for the divorced and “remarried” to retain the “joy” of their adulterous sexual relationships while eventually being admitted to Holy Communion —but only after a perfunctory song and dance to create the false appearance of propriety for what will really be sacrilege on a massive scale.

We know full well, then, what is coming. And we also know how it will be done: an opening to Holy Communion for people living in adultery by way of decisions to be left to the individual bishops’ conferences or individual bishops, acting in the so-called “internal forum” mentioned in the final report of Phony Synod 2015. That is, the sin of sacrilegious Communion will be authorized for those who, in “the internal forum,” do not “feel” they are living in adultery and need to be persuaded eventually — meaning never — that they are.

But what can we do about it? Besides our prayers, above all the Rosary, only one course is open to us: we must oppose in every way possible this incredible and terrifying attempt to destroy the very catholicity — the universality — of the Catholic Church. We must do precisely as suggested by Fr. John Hunwicke, a former Anglican priest who is now a priest of the Catholic Church. He writes:

We, in the Church of England, saw what happened when “Provincial Autonomy” was allowed to ride roughshod over Doctrine, Tradition, Bible ... and even the Dominical Imperative of Unity. It is a thoroughly nasty and miserable experience. Any attempt to introduce anything remotely like it, or anything that could act as a first step towards anything remotely like it, into the Catholic Church, should be resisted by any and every means of Resistance that orthodox Catholics have or can devise.

As a former Anglican, I warn you: decades of internal warfare within the Church on this subject are exactly what the Church Militant can do without. For most of my priestly ministry in the Church of England, this question hung like a dark shadow over my head. Any attempt by anybody [original emphasis] to inflict a similar wound upon the Catholic Church merits, as Cardinal Burke has intimated, Resistance in whatever forms may be necessary, and with as much vigour as God's Grace gives us.

That is the response of a true member of the Church Militant to the unprecedented situation that confronts us at this moment in Church history. On the other hand, we have the smug, self-satisfied conformism of the neo-Catholic establishment, whose symbiotic relation to a degenerating ecclesial status quo can only be expected to continue in this case.